Poets in the pond:
Daniel
Pendergrass
Istanbul Street
Scene, VI
That year, cenim,
we were allowed
To take the public
bus home after school.
It was our first,
delicious taste of freedom,
Much better than
TV, and such a cheap ticket
To mix with a cast
as various as any cheapened drama.
The quiet, assured
businessmen in red ties and white shirts,
In-transit domestics
resting swollen ankles and wearing crisp, starched uniforms,
The anonymous, indiscreet,
official, ordinary,
And then the street
people, with wild eyes and terrific body odor.
We, too, knew our
wide-eyed parts
In that brake and
accelerate world,-
You in your plaid
skirt and bobby socks,
Me and my white
turtle neck and jacket,
Thrilled with our
escape from the private school herd.
Escape! And with
it, the question of ventilation,
A slight problem
on a crowded bus,
This issue of oxygen,
the shortness of breath
When a sudden stop
threw us together
And your face pressed
to mine said this too will come to an end.
That’s what I remember
now:
The lurch to a stop,
a glare from the homeless,
Red and black rippled
skirt, a voice that was toneless,
Your role as talker,
my role as breather,
A bus filled with
your ego, the gas fumes rising like aether.
Poem
Sugar, Whiskey, Christianity:
The ruin of many
a simple culture.
On the beach it’s
postcard day,
Locals poking about
for a wish in a bottle.
Something Western,
a bit flush,
Caught up in a bottle
of vintage Bordeaux.
And above, on the
veranda, legs crossed,
Tea cups cradled,
Summer dress lines smoothed,
Sit the Asian tourists,
plotting to be
Virgins until age
28.
Come and we shall
stoke the fires of these and other tragedies.
Daniel
Pendergrass teaches English to speakers of other languages. He began his
teaching career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Micronesia. Prior to that,
he worked as a journalist in Scottsboro, Alabama.
He
can be reached at: |
Alba
Cruz-Hacker
Engraving Soap
Forty-two months
inside Mordovia
with a grilled square
of gray to guide
her days from nights,
swatting at angels
to kill them, following
dissident verses.
She hunger strikes
for her camp sisters: a witness
to remedies. Her
tools, allowed but once
a month to reach
Igor, her other half of physics,
but no clear thoughts
or letters can escape,
no more than greetings
transcend.
The firing squad
awaits the indiscretions
from her pen. And
with the burnt end
of a wooden match,
she engraves strophes
on every face of
soap, sketches rhymes
against each bar,
embeds each word
as memory. She whispers,
rolls lines between
her tongue and teeth
a hundred times until
they're etched
on the paper of
her mind: notes in low
sounds. And then,
with one cleansing
of her hands, words
circle the drain.
Russian
poet and physicist, Irina Ratushinskaya, became a political
prisoner
in 1982. She spent 3½ years in a labor camp for women where she wrote
250 poems on bars of soap.
**”Engraving
Soap” appears in Volume 8 of Epicenter with its original title, “Dissident
Verses.
Dominican Born
Woman
Bound in slip, bra
and girdle under a cotton dress,
she hails the pinking
horizon in front of the stove,
readying the greka
for demi-cups of thick coffee.
Her fingers know
the best way to strip
the waxy skin from
yucca, scoop oil over brown
eggs, keep the edges
crisp, a soft core.
They come. She serves
and stands,
plate in hand, anticipating
needs.
Armed with brillo
and lye soap, she scrubs
until calderos gleam;
then partnered with a cornhusk
broom, she sways
to Merengue over cement,
switches leads to
shine by towel and stick.
Sweat chases trails
across her covered chest
when arroz con pollo's
smells escape the kitchen
through the wood-slab
window. There's a place,
flatware for everyone,
every dish: rice with meat
does not touch black
beans or the vinegary cabbage.
And they come. She
serves and stands,
her plate in hand,
anticipating needs.
She's intimate with
the cold dish-bucket and the one
for cloth mounds:
those her hands pound and hang
on ropes where warm
beams and breezes do their share.
She folds, irons
the spectrum of color, of texture,
mops her fine tanned
face, bathes
another time in
steam from pots and pans, spaces
the mountain of
dishes, glasses, silverware,
white rice and beans,
adobo-spiced meat.
They come again.
She serves and stands,
her own plate between
her hands.
**This
poem appears in Volume 18 of The Caribbean Writer.
Burka
I wish to see more
clearly
the ripe skins of
fruit at market,
the blemishes in
their underbellies.
My world: fractured
shadows, a peering
mesh void of peripherals,
a loose shape
no one sees inside.
My father, wealthier
by three
camels,"a decent
price," he said as I rode
a hump in sand-dusted
flowing whites
while sisters' drums,
their chants
at my back, carried
me to Kandahar
past the rifles'
checkpoint.
When the fever peaked,
I exposed my tongue
and teeth through
cloth in the doctor's room.
He saw my pupil
inside the cut circle
and a child spoke
for me. And now I kneel
on dirt, fist a sun-baked
clump,
squeeze tight between
dry fingers,
watch it drift before
this cotton hole.
Alba
Cruz-Hacker is originally from the Dominican Republic. A Pushcart Prize
nominee, her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Caribbean Writer,
Canadian Woman Studies, DMQ Review, The Pacific Review, Epicenter, Speechless,
Can We Have Our Ball Back, and Poetry Repair Shop.
She is poetry editor for The Pacific Review and lives
in Southern California with her husband and three children.
Contact
her at: |
Simon
Perchik
This feeble kitchen
match
This feeble kitchen
match
leans the way a
magician's cane
strikes the stage
in flames
doves and all, shaking
more dust
from that same darkness
each match shares
with stars
left behind, in
there somewhere
and your chest snap
open
for those jack-in-the-box
flowers
stretching out,
confident
the dirt is warm,
has no other use
--you will explode,
give up everything
become an offering
and the ice under you
weaker and weaker
set out
for any minute now
and your arm.
Simon
Perchik is an attorney whose poetry has appeared in Partisan Review,
The New Yorker, miller's pond and elsewhere. Readers interested in
more about him are invited to read Magic, Illusion and Other
Realities at www.geocities.com/simonthepoet
which site has a complete bibliography.
e-mail
Simon at: |
Phillip
Ellis
Opus 1068
In winter's folds,
the cold
wind stirs
with indolent fingers
the leaves
of a bush outside
my windows.
It seems,
at night,
as though the yard
becomes alive
with restless
people who
shuffle
their stealthy feet.
Phillip
A. Ellis has lived all his life on the eastern seaboard of Australia.
he has had schizophrenia for over twenty years, although he was diagnosed
almost ten years ago, and is currently on a disability pension. This
leaves him time to write both poetry, and critical works about poetry.
Reach
Phillip at |
Fred
Longworth
The Uninvited
You come to appreciate
the discarded
Christmas tree lying
at your neighbor’s curb --
how it doesn’t crawl
up the driveway,
jimmy a side window
and lurch
its withered limbs
into his living room;
doesn’t tear open
the boxes of ornaments
waiting to be carried
to the garage;
doesn’t slip them
onto drooping branches
with a vast cascade
of desiccated needles;
doesn’t plop its
interloping self
in the corner and
wait for his return --
for in your driveway,
as shadows close,
an intruder rakes
its nails across the sash.
--ward Bound
No more do we take
long walks
together. Or perhaps
we take the same
walks, and the trails
themselves have grown
longer. Or perhaps
our legs move the way
they have always
moved, and the landscape
stretches its fingers
into the same blue sky,
lets down its hair
over the same loamy hillocks,
and mutes the same
crickets as we pass by.
Perhaps if there
were an eclipse of the sun,
we would fold away
our shades, and keep on
thinking.
Sunday, Cuyamaca
State Park
You hike into the
pine forest,
fragments of San
Diego shed behind,
dry mud sloughed
from your boots.
South of Green Valley
Falls,
a flat rock resting
by a stream
offers you a crown.
You peel off socks
and shoes,
plunge your feet
into a swirl
of water. Dragonflies
twist among
the cattails. Tree
tops whirl
with ravens. The
moment curls
around your ankles
in a double helix.
Fred
Longworth's poems have recently appeared, or are pending, in Poetic
Voices, Pudding Magazine, Pearl, California Quarterly, Rattapallax,
many incarnations of the Worm, Folly, kaleidowhirl, Melic Review, MiPo
and Spillway. A San Diego resident, he makes his living restoring
vintage audio components.
Contact
Fred at: |
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